How Mina the Hollower raised 77% of their funds from 35% of their backers on Kickstarter
- Jun 4
- 5 min read
Long-term community building, higher-tier rewards and retro-inspired gaming - the key to Mina The Hollowers' success on Kickstarter.
Kickstarter is more than just shifting digital copies of your game; it’s about giving your community the opportunity to get involved in the development of your game (at a price…), and get your pricing right, and you could see most of your funds come from backers who want more than just to play your game.
Key Takeaways
Build your audience before you launch. Yacht Club didn't buy an audience for Mina, they'd spent a decade earning one. Pre-launch community isn't a nice-to-have; it's what makes campaigns like this possible without paid ads and reach broader audiences who know YCG by name and reputation.
Your physical tiers will out-earn your digital ones. Higher price points with tangible, exclusive items convert a small % of your most engaged backers into your biggest revenue drivers.
Access is a reward tier. The Game Dev Hang Out tier sold community involvement as a product. Dev livestreams, behind-the-scenes access, and being "part of it" have real monetary value to the right audience.
Structure your campaign to generate news more than once. Three press waves: launch, funding milestone, campaign close all kept Mina in front of new audiences throughout.
Frame your Kickstarter as a collaboration, not a pre-order. Yacht Club's messaging was about building something together. That framing changes the backer's relationship to the campaign and justifies higher-tier spending to the community.
Yacht Club Games already knew what they were doing
There’s no real secret sauce to why Mina the Hollower performed so well on Kickstarter. Yacht Club Games already had a successful Kickstarter back in 2013, raising $311,491 of their $75,000 target goal - weirdly becoming fully funded on day 17 and only really taking off in the last week of the Kickstarter
But after the slow start, it’s on Kickstarter where they started a new community of gamers on a new platform of early adopters ready to support the release of Shovel Knight and for whatever came next for the studio. After a handful of adaptations of different Shovel Knight games and a Steam release of a new IP, Cyber Shadow, which sold 36,000 copies on Steam (as per Gamalytic), Yacht Club Games went back to Kickstarter to launch Mina the Hollower, stating:
“We’re financing a majority of Mina the Hollower's development internally. Our main reason for launching a Kickstarter this time is to build a brand new universe in the same way we did with our first game, Shovel Knight—with our community involved in creating something special along with us! Every backer that joins the development will help to make a more robust game. Together, we’ll break new ground!”
There doesn’t seem to be any evidence of Yacht Club Games running any ads for the Kickstarter, but they likely relied on the early backers of Shovel Knight (14,000 backers), and community growth from the release of Shovel Knight and other variations of the game over time. These, along with its following on social media and highly trusted press coverage, seemed to break the norm of needing ads to find an audience and to educate them on Kickstarter and the features of a game and why it deserves your money.
Coverage pattern
The PR strategy appears to have generated three distinct waves:
Announcement day (1 Feb) — Broad media blitz across GameSpot, Game Informer, Gematsu, Shacknews, WorthPlaying, etc.
Funding success (2–5 Feb) — Follow-up coverage once the campaign smashed its goal and stretch goals were announced.
Campaign close (3 Mar) — Final success stories highlighting the $1.2M+ total raised.
For a Kickstarter benchmarking project, this campaign is a particularly good example because Yacht Club generated news at every stage of the funnel rather than relying solely on launch-day coverage.
So, with 70% of backers going for the base digital game, how did Mira the Hollower raise over $1,200,000 on Kickstarter?
The answer is fairly short and simple: higher-priced rewards that include more exclusive items for backers.
Take a look at the table below, the base digital game sold over 13,000 units, including a exclueive wallpaper for $20, and the official launch of the game sold at a launch price of $20 - so there wasn’t much of an incentive for early supporters to support the game early, but its when we get to the rewards that include digital and physical goodies where we see the revenue scale.
Game Dev Hang Out
This reward included the opportunity for backers to join developer live streams and get involved in the chat or to take a back seat and watch the developers at work. It also included the digital artbook and soundtrack, increasing the price from the base game of $20 to $75.
But it’s when we get to the Mina Plush reward that we see the revenue pass the base game sales.
Mina Plush
Now this reward comes with a lot of physical items that will need manufacturing, distributing and shipping etc, so you have to consider the actual revenue made here, but with 1,227 backers (5% of total backers), raised over the base game sales and contributed towards 25% of the total campaign funds raised.
The physical game with a reward price of $100 also raised $150,400, 12% of the campaign funds.
The digital artwork and soundtrack bundle, with a reward price of $50 raised $50,000.
Reward | Price | Items | Units Sold | Revenue |
Support Us | $5.00 | Wallpaper | 140 | $700.00 |
Base Game | $20.00 | Digital Game, Wallpaper | 13,654 | $273,080.00 |
Backstage Music Access | $30.00 | Digital Game, Wallpaper, Digital Sound track | 2000 | $60,000.00 |
Digital Artbook | $50.00 | Above + Digital Sound track, Access to music livestreams, Digital Artbook (PDF) | 1018 | $50,900.00 |
Game Dev Hangout | $75.00 | Above + Dev livestream | 258 | $19,350.00 |
Physical Game | $100.00 | Above + Physical Game | 1504 | $150,400.00 |
Physical Sountrack | $125.00 | Above + Physical Soundtrack (CD) | 334 | $41,750.00 |
Exclusive Backer Pin | $150.00 | Above + Exclusive Back Enamel Pin | 198 | $29,700.00 |
Name in the game | $200.00 | Above + Name in the game | 477 | $95,400.00 |
Physical Artbook | $218.00 | Above + Physical Artbook | 218 | $47,524.00 |
Mina Plush | $250.00 | Above + Mina Plush | 1227 | $306,750.00 |
Game design document book | $500.00 | Above + Version of game design document in book form | 240 | $120,000.00 |
NPC Director for a day | $750.00 | Above + NPC Director | 20 | $15,000.00 |
Assistant Director for a day | $1,000.00 | Above + Assistant Director | 7 | $7,000.00 |
Director for a day | $3,000.00 | Above + Director for the day | 3 | $9,000.00 |
Total | All Rewards | 21,298 | $1,226,554.00 | |
Total | $30+ rewards | 7504 | $952,774.00 |
Launching your game on Kickstarter?
Full Charge helps indie developers build the audience, strategy, and ads needed to launch funded campaigns. Get in touch at fullcharge.games — the earlier you start, the better your launch
